The Unqualified Gospel

Robert Capon on ex-sinners and the scandal of grace.

Jacopo Tintoretto, “The Last Supper”

The late, ever-provocative theologian Robert Capon, who passed away in 2013, always had a knack for putting words together in ways that’d make you stop in your tracks. You weren’t sure whether to be offended or relieved, or if the previous sentence was even allowed to be published in a book on theology. Capon’s grammatical gymnastics were almost always tuned to the note of grace, as he took great care and delight in unfolding all of its prodigality and abundance for “the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead.”¹ This is also what made him such a theological provocateur — namely, that his insistence on the grace of Christ throughout Scripture is the essence of what should spill from the lips of every preacher, even if those in the pews are inclined to hear something else.

In his book The Parables of Judgment, Capon brings this reality to light when he writes, “As any preacher who seriously preaches the Gospel of grace can tell you, the troops are not amused by the prospect of absolutely free salvation.”² While at first, this might sound like another straw man upheld by a stubborn preacher addicted to grace, anecdotally, humanity’s propensity will always be drawn to checklists that are doable and laws that are keepable. Instead of a gift, we’d rather be given a halftime speech that inflames our perceived ability to do more and try harder. “The first instinct of most Christians,” Capon continues, “after they have smiled indulgently at the preacher’s charmingly easygoing concept of salvation, is to nail him to the wall for knocking the props out from under divine retribution for nasty deeds. They do not want grace, they want law.”³

Although this might seem over the top, what Capon is getting at is the default setting of the human heart. Its True North, if you will, is scrambled, always pointing back to self. The instinct of those who are beset by sin and selfishness is to assume that one’s problems are solvable by one’s effort — that it is within one’s capacity to rectify what went so wrong so long ago. This, of course, is laughably hubristic, as if the last several millennia haven’t already proven humankind’s severe inability to do what’s right of its own accord. That doesn’t stop us from trying, though. We still forge ahead with our own haphazard schemes of merit and demerit, thinking that with the right dosage of grace injected into our religious efforts and spiritual disciplines, we can make it. We can pull it off. We can live this thing called the “Christian life.” But as subtle as it may seem, this conception of Christianity actually misses the point and is more in line with what Capon was talking about before.

You see, although there are scores of churchgoers who “give lip service to the notion of free grace and dying love, we do not like it,” Capon says,⁴ especially when it comes to the notion of putting this free grace into practice. Grace exists, more often than not, as a well-worded theory as opposed to an approach to the life of faith. It’s just too, well, free and “indiscriminate,” to use Capon’s word. “It lets rotten sons and crooked tax farmers and common tarts into the kingdom,” he writes, “and it thumbs its nose at really good people.”⁵ What sent the religious world into a tizzy during the days of Jesus’s Galilean ministry was the prodigality of kindness, mercy, and compassion he showed to the wrong sort of people. All those tax collectors and prostitutes didn’t need what that Rabbi from Nazareth was offering. They needed Moses’s rules and regulations for proper living.

Of course, Jesus did go about cleaning up people’s lives, but he did so knowing full well what lay ahead of him. Nothing he did or said was ever divorced from his impending self-sacrifice on the cross, where all the atrocities of humanity’s pride, vice, and self-interest are accounted for and expunged by his own blood. When he tells the adulteress that she isn’t condemned and, therefore, she can go and “sin no more” (John 8:11), he isn’t doing what the evangelical church so often loves to do when it tacks on a few caveats to its proclamation of grace. Instead, he’s delivering a word of promise to her in light of what he was about to do — namely, assume her adultery as his own and give her his righteousness. It is only by and through that assumption of wrongdoing and offering righteousness that the woman is truly free. “The world is saved only by his passion, death, and resurrection,” Capon maintains, “not by any of the devices that, in its unbelief, it thinks it can take refuge in.”⁶

The temptation to freight the gospel of grace with caveats and qualifiers is ever-alluring, betraying our suspicion of actually proclaiming what Jesus said without attaching a string or two. There are several reasons for this, with most of them revolving around the earnest desire to see others change. As well-intentioned as that desire may be, it often accelerates into something other than the gospel, as we lunge into the process by which Christ’s Spirit continually raises sinners from the dead by inserting ourselves into the equation. This is the realization I’ve come to in my years in pastoral ministry — namely, we qualify grace because we don’t actually trust the Holy Spirit to do what he is going to do. Maybe, as Capon suggests, we’re worried about being embarrassed by “the divine joke of grace”:

We are resentful at being the butts of the divine joke of grace that says nothing matters except plain, old, de facto, yes-Jesus faith. And when we institutionalize that resentment by giving the impression that the church is not for sinners and gainsayers, we are a disgrace to the Gospel — a bushel of works hiding the Light of the world. We are under judgment. Oh, yes; we say we believe. But what we believe is largely an ethico-theological construct of our own devising, a system in our heads that will make the world safe for democracy, and for thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent ex-sinners like ourselves.⁷

The idea that the church is populated by a bunch of “ex-sinners” is quite literally the nail hitting the head of this whole thing. After all, the church isn’t a museum of advanced saints but a community of forgiven sinners rallying around what’s been done for them. What makes the good news so compellingly and unendingly good isn’t that it enrolls us in some sort of divine moral recovery program, but that it foregrounds the work of Christ on our behalf. Therefore, to assume that the heavenly kingdom is comprised of folks who used to be bad but now are good is to miss the point. It’s never been about such rote categories as “good” and “bad.” Rather, Christ’s ministerial objective was about peeling back the curtain on faith versus unfaith. This is why Jesus puts it as plainly as he can: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29). Capon puts it like this:

The Father’s will for you — his whole will, his entire plan of salvation — is that you believe in Jesus, nothing more. He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you, he has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him. And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will. But if you do not believe him — if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed — well, you will never hear the blessed silence of his uncondemnation over the infernal racket of your own voice.⁸

In the end, there isn’t much room to wiggle. Either we hold fast to Christ and what he did for us through his cross and empty tomb, full stop, or we obstinately hold fast to ourselves and what we might be able to achieve through our own effort. The latter is very much hugging ourselves to death, while the former opens ourselves up to be embraced by the one who makes us alive.

Grace and peace to you, my friends.

1. Robert Capon, The Parables of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 91–92.

2. Robert Capon, The Parables of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 117.

3. Capon, Judgment, 117.

4. Capon, Judgment, 109.

5. Capon, Judgment, 109.

6. Capon, Judgment, 115.

7. Capon, Judgment, 109–10.

8. Capon, Judgment, 110.